Top 50 LGBT-Friendly Colleges List Released

Campus Pride released an index this week to base colleges off of when looking at safety and academic life for LGBT students at schools across the country. This is the sixth year the index has served as a national benchmark for how LGBT-friendly individual higher education institutions are—and an indicator of progress being made.

“For six years in a row, Campus Pride has seen an increase in the number of campuses coming out as LGBT-friendly and making notable improvements to LGBT academic life, so we decided to honor 50 campuses with our national distinction,” Shane Windmeyer, Executive Director of Campus Pride, said in a statement. “Today the Campus Pride Index has over 425 campuses featured online and for the first time ever we have 56 campuses who achieved the highest five stars overall rating, the largest number to date.”

Top 50 LGBT Friendly Colleges

Usually the site only releases 25 of the top colleges, but this year their list had 50 schools, a happy indicator that educational institutions are on the up-and-up when it comes to being LGBT-friendly. The Campus Pride tool is free to use and can be found at CampusPrideIndex.org.

Windmeyer also said there is a lot to be learned from these top 50+ schools, which are working to specifically address the recruitment and retention of LGBT students as well as safety for transgender students, which has notoriously been a target for high levels of discrimination throughout history.

Some of the featured schools included Brown University in Rhode Island, Cornell University in New York, Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, the University of Washington in Washington, and Harvard University in Massachusetts.

Want to find out how LGBT-friendly your campus is? Check out Campus Pride’s online index to see where it stands in the rankings.